Using Powershell to Export an SVN XML List to CSV

I needed to get a list of files in a specific folder of an SVN repository and export it as an csv file. The main reason was to get the size of the contents of the folder, but I also wanted to work with the results (sort, group, filter) and Excel was the tool I wanted to do it in. I will use the svn command line to get the list of files and directories and Powershell to parse, transform and output the CSV file.

The next part of the script we are sending each entry node object to our processing pipeline to produce the output. First we set the properties we want. If you want to see the XML, you could output to a file like this:

This simply takes the XML document created by [xml] and saves it to a file. If you view this file you would see that there is a root lists node that has a child node list, that has child node entry, which in turn has child nodes: name, size, and commit (with revision attribute and child node for author and date).

| select -property…. – this takes each of our entry nodes and parses it to select the output we want. Example: I want the author included in my output so I will tell Powershell to include author, N=’author’ and set the value to the value of the author node from the commit node object, E={$_.commit.author}. You will notice that to get the revision I am asking Powershell to GetAttribute on the commit node. As you can see, its pretty powerful and I could reformat my output as I see fit. More info, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd347697.aspx.

Conclusion

Powershell strikes again and provides a simple and easy way to work with XML output. I actually did another script that prints the size of the repository folder by getting a sum of the “size” nodes, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader (hint: Measure-Object Cmdlet and the -Sum Parameter would be useful).